As-Salih Ayyub (Najm al-Din)
Sultan of Egypt
1205 – 1249
- Born
- 1205
- Died
- 1249
- Reign
- 1240 – 1249
- House
- Ayyubid Dynasty
Biography
Najm al-Din Ayyub, regnal name al-Malik as-Salih, was the last Ayyubid sultan to dominate Egypt and Syria, and the unwitting founder of the regime that destroyed his house. A son of al-Kamil born in 1205, he was passed over in his father's final dispositions in favor of a younger brother, al-Adil II, and spent the late 1230s as a prince of the Jazira assembling the means of his revenge — chief among them bands of Khwarazmian mercenaries, displaced by the Mongol destruction of their empire, and a growing corps of purchased Turkish slave soldiers. After a reversal that left him briefly a prisoner of his cousin at Kerak, his partisans in Cairo deposed al-Adil II, and in June 1240 as-Salih entered the citadel as sultan.
Mistrustful by temperament and experience, he ruled through instruments loyal to himself alone. He expanded his Kipchak Turkish mamluk regiments, quartering the elite corps in a fortress on Roda Island in the Nile — whence their name, the Bahriyya, the 'regiment of the river' — and married Shajar al-Durr, a slave woman of Turkic origin who became his trusted consort. In 1244 his Khwarazmian allies sacked Jerusalem, ending the Christian tenure dating from his father's treaty of 1229, and that autumn his army crushed the combined Frankish-Syrian Ayyubid coalition at La Forbie near Gaza, a defeat of the crusader states second only to Hattin. Damascus submitted to him in 1245, restoring most of his grandfather al-Adil's empire.
The response from Europe was the Seventh Crusade of Louis IX of France, which landed at Damietta in June 1249. As-Salih, already dying of a tubercular ulcer, was carried on a litter to the front at Mansura. He died there on 22 November 1249 with the crusade undefeated and his heir Turanshah far away on the Euphrates. Shajar al-Durr and the emir Fakhr al-Din concealed his death, forging his signature on orders, until the army held and the succession could be arranged. The Bahri mamluks he had created went on to rout the crusade — and then to seize the state, ending Ayyubid Egypt within months of his death.
Updated June 2026 · How we research
Events
Louis IX of France took the cross after a grave illness in 1244, the year Jerusalem was lost to Khwarazmian raiders and the Ayyubid sultan as-Salih Ayyub crushed the Latin-Syrian coalition at La Forbie. The crusade he assembled was the best-financed and best-organized of the century, directed not at Palestine but at Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power. The army landed in June 1249 and took Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile, almost without resistance after its garrison fled. As-Salih Ayyub, already mortally ill, died in November 1249 as the crusaders advanced up the Delta. His widow, Shajar al-Durr, concealed the sultan's death with the cooperation of senior commanders, issuing orders under his name while the heir, Turanshah, traveled from the Jazira. In February 1250 the crusader vanguard under the king's brother Robert of Artois forced the channel at Mansurah and charged into the town, where it was annihilated in street fighting by the Bahriyya mamluk regiment; Robert was killed. The main army held its ground but could go no farther, and with its river supply line cut by Egyptian galleys, disease and hunger forced a retreat. In April 1250 the army was overwhelmed near Fariskur and Louis was taken prisoner. The king was ransomed for a vast sum and the return of Damietta, and sailed to Acre, where he spent four years fortifying the Latin coastal towns before returning to France in 1254. The crusade's deeper consequence unfolded in Cairo: in May 1250 the Bahriyya murdered Turanshah, weeks after his accession, and Shajar al-Durr was proclaimed sultana, soon yielding power to the mamluk commander Aybak whom she married. The coup ended Ayyubid rule in Egypt and founded the Mamluk sultanate that would dominate the region for over 250 years.
Also there: Louis IX, Turanshah (al-Muazzam Turanshah), Shajar al-Durr
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Place As-Salih Ayyub (Najm al-Din) in the wider world of ruling houses.
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